Euro. 2012 here we come (hopefully)

England vs Bulgaria

Ah International football is back.  The Euro. 2012 qualifiers are underway which means the London Olympics are just a couple of years away.  Best get cracking on those preparations, eh?  Wembley is a wonderful place to watch football if you like sitting down and paying extortionately for the privilege.  You do get some free Nivea for men moisturiser samples on the way in so I suppose it isn't all bad.  They have sorted the pitch out now by making it partially artificial.  Good enough for Internationals but definitely not for the Football Conference, just ask Durham.  Now the pitch is partly artificial will the Conference be changing the play-off final venue?  No?  Didn't think so.


England are in a reasonably tough group for the qualifiers or so Capello keep saying but realistically we should be able to come top in a group comprised of Bulgaria, Switzerland, Montenegro and Wales.  That said we should probably have come top in a group made up of Algeria, Slovenia and the U.S.A. so let's not count the chickens just yet.

Defoe celebrates his second.

Anyway, on to the game.  England dominated for the most part and were in a fairly comfortable position when Defoe put us one up inside the first five minutes.  Most games see each team have a spell of attacking but this wasn't the case as Bulgaria struggled to get into the match in any sort of competitive sense.  In the second half Defoe bagged two more and claimed the man of the match award which on any other day James Milner would have run off with by a country mile.  Milner caused the Bulgarian defence massive problems and eventually caused the right-back to be subbed in order to avoid a red card.


The defence were pretty solid with the exception of one Dawson mistake.  Cahill replaced Dawson after his injury and did a decent job.  The injury to Dawson did highlight one problem at Wembley, segregation.  For an International qualifier the standard of segregation was shocking.  There were a lot of Bulgarian fans intermingled with the England fans throughout the stadium and this caused issues when the Bulgarians took to booing the stricken Dawson winding the England fans up in the process.  Poor stewarding and crowd control that.

Milner lines up a free-kick.

Wayne Rooney continued to be woeful, despite having a hand in the goals, mis-controlling the ball and misplacing passes continuously.  It was almost like he had something else on his mind.  Surely it is time to drop Rooney who hasn't scored for England in over a year now in favour of someone like Zamora who, when fit, will bring something different to the line-up.  A bit of time out might help Rooney regain some of the passion for the game which was evidently missing this time out.


Adam Johnson proved why he should be in the squad with a belting finish to make it four and to get England's qualifying campaign off to a good start before we face Switzerland on Tuesday in Basel.  Not that half the fans will have seen it as the stadium always starts to empty about ten minutes before the end.  I assume these are the same people who leave early for half time as well.  Missing quarter of an hour of a game you have paid over thirty pounds to see seems a little stupid to me, but then what do I know?  

The train to London, not exactly packed.

The train out of Wembley was a bit of a debacle.  On reaching the platform we were unable to get onto the train as it was rammed.  At least it was rammed at the end available to us.  The stewards had decided that the other end of the train, with seats available, was at capacity and wouldn't let anyone else on.  This ridiculous situation was exacerbated when the next train pulled in and no-one got on.  The train was practically empty, the few people on the second train could have easily got on the first train and been into London a good fifteen minutes earlier.  Well done, jobsworth stewards, you'll have to do much better than that at the Olympics!